Religion Dispatches
…haviors that were chosen, by the way. I figure if these are some of God’s “best” and gay and lesbian people are not, perhaps it’s simply because we have a higher standard of morality than God’s “best.” Indeed, I think the LGBT community has far more courage than Osteen, who simply wants to “stay in my lane” and preach the feel-good gospel that keeps the money rolling in. What makes God’s “best,” Joel, is not someone who hides behind a happy gosp…
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…, they are calling us to lay aside the egotism that holds us back from our best selves and from the divine. This is certainly true of the doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation, for example. They also insist that the best way of achieving this is by compassion, in which, “all day and every day” we have to dethrone ourselves from the centre of our world and put another there. The doctrines and mythos of religion only make sense if we put them into pr…
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…sociopathic question, “Could a plague of biblical proportions be America’s best hope for religious revival?” Meanwhile, in Christianity Today David Roach is celebrating a supposed uptick in conversions achieved by evangelistic organizations that have built web resources for the purpose of deliberately playing on people’s fears of coronavirus as a means of bringing them to Jesus. Extremist organizations are also exploiting the pandemic to recruit f…
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…d enacted the nation’s strictest work requirements for welfare recipients. Best friend to the plutocrat and ruthless scourge to the poorest among us: that’s Sam Brownback’s actual idea of “national moral leadership.” But I do hope that Rabbi Saperstein is right in respect to the guy’s qualifications for his new job. And at the very least, it will be a great day for Kansas and Kansans when Sam Brownback departs Topeka. _______ 8.4.17 Author’s No…
Read More…right, everyone: Rick Perry’s anti-science ramblings gave Jon Huntsman the best week of his campaign. But perhaps an even bigger accomplishment by Perry was reorganizing reality in such a way as to make Mormons—reputed to be the most politically conservative religious groups in the U.S.—appear moderate. In fact, Perry has the two climate-changing-believing Mormons in the GOP presidential hopeful pool looking like downright liberals. And Perry hims…
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…at alternative title would you give the book? Are Diamonds Always a Girl’s Best Friend? Myths of Sex and Jewelry How do you feel about the cover? I love the cover, the way the designer cropped the Ingres painting to make it more mysterious and suggestive. The Indian edition also has a lovely cover, a painting by Raja Ravi Varma of an Indian woman covered in jewelry and smiling seductively. Is there a book out there you wish you had written? Which…
Read More…ork, and they have the potential to do even more. I have no doubt that many consultants and stakeholders wrestled with all the issues I’ve spotted here, and many more, and that this reflects their sincere best efforts to balance multiple constituencies and interests, many of which are at odds with one another. It’s just too bad that, to me at least, what they came up with reflects that….
Read MoreA study from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that Americans who don’t believe in God scored better on a religious study quiz than those who identify with a specific religion. The U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey, a nationwide poll of 3,412 Americans age 18 and older, found that out of 32 questions related to various religions, atheists and agnostics typically got the most correct responses. Jews and Mormons also scored higher than…
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This year saw the launch of the Cubit: RD’s answer to the mainstream media’s coverage of the intersection of religion and science—those too-familiar stories in which religion and science are represented as either fundamentally at odds, or oddly conjoined. Over the past nine months we have debated, among other things, multiverse theory with Rob Bell, investigated the cultural roots of the anti-vaccine movement, critiqued Silicon Valley asceticism,…
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With all the memes wishing a good riddance to 2016, and John Oliver’s epic send-off to this annus horribilis, it may seem small comfort that this was a year that might be remembered as one of the most important in a long time in my corner of the scholarly universe: for works that illuminate race and religion in America, and for books reinterpreting African American religious history for a new, more disillusioned generation. If you surmise this co…
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